The Shed

by Chris Philbrook

  Tony went to the kitchen and the side door that led to the driveway. He opened the creaky screen door there and stepped out into the mosquito and black fly paradise of his nana’s yard. Several of the animals slipped out as the door opened, and he didn’t dare waste time trying to get them back. The cats went outside all the time anyway, and the dogs almost never ran off the small piece of property. He didn’t think about how they might attract zombies. Zombies still weren’t real.

  One slow step at a time the teenager walked to the back where his bike was, and where the red shed was. He looked at the clothesline where the sheets flapped in the light breeze and didn’t see his beloved grandparent.

  “Nana,” Tony called out just above a whisper. “Tony, she’ll never hear you. There are no zombies here. You are in the middle of nowhere,” he whispered aloud. “Nana!” he yelled out.

  The evening gave him no more response than the ceaseless noise of crickets, and frogs. His nana wasn’t outside.

  “I need a weapon,” he said to himself. He closed his eyes and tried to think of where one might be. Grandpa sold all his guns years ago, and the kitchen knives didn’t seem like enough. He opened his eyes and saw the shed. Tony walked over to the door and undid the latch that held the two doors open. He peered into the hot, dark space and a glint of light off to the side caught his eye. He reached out over the stacked cases of canned juice for the metallic object and pulled it off the wall.

  It was a sickle. Sharp as it needed to be; he hefted the weight and swung it a few times in the warm summer air. He imagined his grandfather using the sharp tool to cut down tall grasses on the edge of his property during the late summer months. The idea made him smile.

  “That’ll do.”

  Tony went back in, sickle in hand, and made his way through the kitchen and living room to the hall that led to the side of the ranch where the bedrooms and bathrooms were. The guinea pigs roused in their wood chip filled aquariums as he passed. One of them squeaked at him when he paused and ran his hands across the glass.

  He opened the first door slower than molasses running uphill in January. The thin, hollow door kept his secret and swung in without a creak or a groan. The warm bathroom on the other side was empty, even when he built up the courage to pull the curtain of the shower away. It took him almost ten minutes to calm his shaking hands, and build up the courage to open another door.

  He chose the guest room–his room–to open next, and he knew the door was quiet. He opened the door 10 times a day, and had confidence in it. Nevertheless he took his sweet time turning the faux brass knob and pushing the door inward. He looked around the near-black room with his sickle hand hovering near the light switch. He didn’t turn it on. What if something saw him?

  A car flew by on the road outside just as he leaned into his dark bedroom. The stark white of the headlights careened off the glass covering the dated floral prints his nana had hung on the wall and the flash blinded him. He panicked and backed up, losing his balance as the heel of his sneaker caught on the thicker rug. He fell and smashed his head against the wood paneling of the hall, dazing himself and lodging the sharp end of the sickle in the rug and pad beneath it.

  “Shit,” he said as he reached to the back of his head. An egg had already formed where his skull had hit the wall. He twisted his head side to side, testing the growing soreness in his neck. He looked to the living room, then down the hall towards the last rooms of the house.

  His tiny, frail nana stood in the dark at the end of the hallway. Lit only by the dim yellow glow of a nightlight in her bedroom she stood silent in her wispy nightgown and puffy slippers. Her hands hung limp at her sides and she faced down at him. Tony couldn’t see her eyes.

  She wasn’t coughing.

  “Nana? Nana are you okay?” he asked her, slowly turning his feet to face towards her. If she was dead, and if the news was right about dead people, he’d be able to mount some kind of defense against her. Maybe it’d work long enough for him to build the courage to use the sickle on her and save his own life.

  “Nana?” he called out again.

  Instead of responding, she took a shuffling step forward, and Tony’s heart went as cold as ice. This was it. All the worst the news told him he could imagine was happening. He had to kill his undead nana. With a sweaty hand he pulled the sickle’s blade free of the rug.

  She coughed.

  “Antonio, why are you on the floor like that?” she asked him, and coughed again. One of her limp arms went to her chest where she pounded between her breasts several times. The other arm went to the paneled wall so she could stand steady.

  “Jesus, Nana. I thought you were dead. I almost hurt you,” Tony said.

  “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, Antonio. That’ll get you sent to Hell. Your mother taught you better than that.” She hacked up something thick and produced another tissue from her nightgown pocket.

  “She did, I’m sorry. I’m just stressed out. Today has been real hard on me,” the teenager said as he got to his feet. He hid the sickle behind his back, ashamed of its presence.

  “Long day in the heat. You carried a lot of heavy things in from the store. I’m glad you got all that tomato juice. Each cup is a serving of vegetables you know.”

  “Yeah, I did. You’re okay? You’re feeling okay?”

  “I’m fine, Antonio. Fine,” she said, waving her hands about as if the cough that was killing was nothing to fret over.

  “I’m glad you saw the news this morning and asked me to go shopping when you did. I think the stores were dangerous not long after I got home. I got enough food for us for days. Weeks maybe,” Tony said, feeling relief and more than a little love for his Nana. He expressed it by tossing the sickle into the living room and moving in to give the diminutive lady a hug. She returned it just as fierce as he gave it to her.

  “I didn’t watch any news this morning, George,” she said as they let the hug fade. “Come to bed. It’s late and Carson is about to come on. We should work on the garden before it gets too hot outside in the morning.”

  Tony watched his Nana turn and walk into the bedroom she had shared with his grandpa for their whole adult life and shut the door. He heard the bed creak as she got into it, and he listened as she coughed over and over until she went silent.

  Asleep, or dead he didn’t know.

  Tony left the dark hallway and set about making the house more suitable to survive the upcoming days in.

  He didn’t have much to work with, and he didn’t know what to do with what he had.

  He only cried a little.

  - Part Five -

  Visiting the Neighbors

  “I’ve made some lasagna,” Nana said to Tony. “I want you to bring a pan of it over to the Pulaski family two houses down. They’re very nice people. They drive Hondas. I also want you to make sure the neighborhood animals are doing well. Put food out.”

  “Nana, it’s not… like, safe out there, remember? The power is out, the phones haven’t worked in days, the radio stations stopped broadcasting, and the few cars that have driven by go like, a hundred miles an hour. We’ve heard gunshots, Nana. A lot of them.”

  “Fireworks, George. Don’t be so paranoid. And if the power is out, how did my stove run? Answer me that, smarty.”

  “It’s propane, Nana.”

  “Still needs electric,” she with certainty, and five heavy coughs that shook her little body and the bob of white curls on top of her head.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Tony corrected. “It’s just fire. If you want me to check on the Pulaski family I will, but we haven’t seen anything move in the area in a couple days. I’ll go and come back for the lasagna once I know it’s safe. Then I’ll check on the animals.”

  “The lasagna is best served when it’s fresh out of the oven, George.”

  “Nana, I’m not George. I’m your grandson, Tony? Antonio?”

  “If you won’t bring them the food, George, I guess I will,” she got up from the tired
kitchen table and turned towards the stove where the pasta dish awaited delivery. She crossed the distance and pulled open a drawer. Two oven mitts appeared in her hand and she began to put them on.

  “Fine,” Tony said, standing. “I’ll bring the lasagna. Give me the mitts.”

  “Oh I knew you’d see the light, Antonio. Here, take these mitts. The dish is hot.”

  *****

  The pasta and the mitts would be his end; Tony knew that in complete certainty. He walked through the backyard of the house beside his nana’s with both hands in mitts, and both mitts on the side of the Pyrex dish filled with lasagna. Stuck in the rear loop of his jeans was the handle of the sickle. If he had to get to the weapon quickly, he’d either fumble because of the mitts, or he’d slash his hand open.

  And if the zombies were real, the fresh spilled blood would bring them in for miles.

  He knew it.

  Tony was more frightened that his nana would hear back from mother Pulaski that the food was delivered cold.

  The Pulaski house was a modest three bedroom ranch just like his grandparent’s place. Probably built plus or minus a year by the same builder who put the studs in the walls he slept behind. The primary difference between the two homes lay in where the secondary door was put. In his nana’s house the door was on the right hand side of the house where the driveway was. The Pulaski back door was an actual back door.

  A cement form set of stairs sat on top of a fringe of gray gravel that circled the whole house. Three steps got you to the level of the door and you could hold the wrought iron handrail if you needed it.

  As Tony approached the back of the house with the warm dish in hand he gave it a wide berth. He stayed away mostly because he felt evil trespassing in the neighbor’s backyard, but practically because he didn’t know if they were undead or not.

  Hell, he didn’t even know if the zombies were real. He hadn’t seen any yet.

  Visibility through the drawn curtains was nil. If anything moved inside the home he wouldn’t be able to see it. The glare of the afternoon daylight coupled with the fabric made for a barrier his eyes couldn’t pass through. He felt better about his blankets blocking the windows.

  Tony finished his wide circle of the backyard and walked straight at the cement stairs that he guessed led to their kitchen. Of course their stove would have to be in a different place than his nana’s, but still, it made sense in his head. His sneaker-clad foot crunched on the gravel, making more noise than he’d heard in days. He froze, eyes fixed on the thin double curtain of the backdoor window.

  The dish got a little hotter in his hands and he readjusted where his fingers were. He looked back up at the window and put one sneakered foot on the bottom step. He paused, and then added his weight onto the foot.

  He expected bells, whistles, car alarms and the sound of a thousand windows breaking but his expectations fell short of reality. The step he took made no noise, and failed to set off the marching band lurking in the back of his imagination. He lifted his other foot off the gravel and stepped on the next level of the stairs.

  The marching band arrived.

  The concrete stairs poured somewhere else and delivered off the back of a flatbed were level only so far as the gravel beneath it remained level. With rain coming off the roof, or kids pounding up and down the stairs the tiny stones moved one by one over the years, and when Tony put his weight on the 2nd step the entire form shifted towards the house.

  The rusty, mostly black wrought iron railing mounted in the old concrete levered back towards the side of the house and cracked hard into the vinyl siding. Tony stopped and leaned back, trying to halt any loud damage but it was too late. The sharp end of the railing snagged on the siding and when it popped off the side of the house it pulled a finger-sized chunk free, making yet another loud popping noise.

  Something just inside the back door, just behind the curtains moved.

  “Shit!” Tony yelped. He dropped the warm dish filled with his nana’s cooking and by the time it shattered on the step that betrayed him he was already ten yards away, heading back home.

  Tony got the oven mitts off and threw them towards the side door of his grandmother’s home as his breathing became shallow and ragged. True to his fear when he went to grab his sickle out of his rear belt loop he slashed the palm of his right hand open and he fumbled the blood-slick weapon into the dirt driveway. When he finally got it up off the ground the dirt served to give his skin traction, and despite the pain it caused him, he had a grip on the weapon.

  Nothing came. Not even after he caught his breath, and not even after he stopped crying.

  Then, for the first time in his life, he lied to his nana when he went inside.

  “Thank you for doing that, George,” she said, and Tony’s heart broke.

  The infection from the sickle blade in his hand had taken root by then.

  - Part Six -

  The Apocalypse is at the Door

  Tony traded his grandpa’s sickle as his regular weapon in when he found his grandpa’s buck knife several days later.

  Bored out of his mind and feeling stir crazy in the mattress, sheet, and blanket barricaded hot box, he allowed a lapse of judgment while his nana smoked her last prized cigarettes in the kitchen. At any rate, she hadn’t called him Antonio in almost a week, and the likelihood that she’d recognize him as he fumbled around in her bedroom’s dresser drawers was nil.

  He found the 4 inch folding blade decorated with an etched antler centerpiece in a drawer underneath his grandpa’s black dress socks, beside his boxers. He slipped the knife into his pocket and felt the presence of his grandpa. He felt safer.

  The feeling of safety persisted for almost a full day.

  The sound of car brakes squealing followed by a heavy bang just outside on Route 18 woke Tony up. He’d become a paranoid, restless sleeper in the scorching July weather since society collapsed, and anytime one of the dogs moved in the house, or when a cat jumped on his bed, or when one of the guinea pigs got into their wheel his eyes snapped open. On nights where his nana snored in her room down the hall, he didn’t sleep, period. The bright red infection in the palm of his hand throbbed him awake as often as not as well.

  Never mind the thoughts about his mom, little brother, father, and dead grandpa, and the smell coming from the toilet that was filled with their feces.

  The crash got him right out of bed and right into his tattered sneakers within seconds. He didn’t have to get dressed; he slept in his dirty clothes now.

  Tony climbed over his hard bed and the thin sheet stretched atop it and went to the window of his room. He pulled the very edge of the towel he’d stapled into the frame back and peered out at the lights in the road.

  A single car had skidded to a stop just past the house. A silver minivan with a windshield that had so many cracks in it, it could’ve been frosted glass. The van had turned almost sideways in the road and the driver had stepped out. He walked to the back of the still-running van, and in the red glow of the rear lights Tony saw that the man held a shiny revolver. He also sported a thick, shaggy beard.

  Tony hadn’t even shaved since the power died.

  On the shoulder of the road where the dirt met the unmowed lawn his grandpa maintained for decades was an outstretched, moaning man. The bearded van driver walked towards him, barrel of his pistol leading the way. Tony could hear everything through the screen of the open window.

  “Don’t kill me,” the moaning man begged as he crawled through the stony dirt and onto his nana’s lawn.

  “How bad are you hurt?” the man with the gun and the beard demanded.

  “Not bad. It’s not bad. My leg is broken. Maybe. Don’t shoot me.”

  “I can’t help you, and no one else if going to come through to, either. You’ll die if I leave you. Then you know what happens. You’ll become one of them,” the van driver said. He cocked the hammer on his pistol and aimed it at the guy on the lawn.

  “Please. Don’t kill me,
” the guy with the broken leg begged again. “Leave me my bike. I’ll splint my leg. I’m riding east.”

  The man with the gun looked distraught to Tony. He almost… wanted to kill the guy he’d hit with his car?

  “You’re sure you’ll be okay?” gun guy asked.

  “Positive. I know first aid,” broken leg man said as he rolled all the way onto his back in the grass. “I will be okay,” he said, and nearly cried out in pain.

  “Okay. Fine. I’m sorry we hit you. I didn’t see you. I didn’t expect… It’s so late, and I haven’t seen anyone in….”

  “It’s cool. It’s cool. Namaste. Go take care of your family,” lawn man said.

  “I hope you make it,” the man with the gun said. He lowered the hammer and took a few steps backward. It was about then Tony realized he could hear a little girl crying in the back of the van.

  “I hope I do too,” the man with the broken leg said, obviously unsure.

  Tony hoped he made it too.

  *****

  He didn’t.

  It wasn’t for a lack of trying. Bicycle man crawled in the dark towards Tony in the house for maybe 20 feet before giving up, exhausted and overwhelmed with pain. The man remained still for 30 minutes, gathering strength before he turned around and crawled all the way back to his bicycle and the twin saddle bags attached to the rear wheel near the seat.

  Tony watched for a solid hour–riveted–as the man’s movements slowed, and became more and more difficult. He got the zipper on one bag open, and got a plastic bag out. He fumbled with the opening on that bag for what seemed like an hour before he rested his head back until it hit the grass, and fell asleep.

  He never woke up.

  Tony tore away from the window and ran into the kitchen where he mixed some dry milk with bottled water and made a bowl of cereal. He brought his bowl back to the window as the sun began to rise and ate heaping spoonfuls of it with his reddened, swollen, sore hand as he watched bicycle man die.